Metacritic reviews

Rohmer's films are renowned for their beauty, so it's surprising that he made a picture using digital video rather than film. But this was the right choice.

Played by Lucy Russell with a defiant, unapologetic embrace of aristocratic privilege, Grace is a maddening yet fascinating character.

This is absorbing throughout--not just a history lesson but, as always with Rohmer, a story about individuals

Just as interesting, if not more so, is how Rohmer integrates his very contemporary concerns into a period drama, how he creates characters who manage to be true to our times as well as their own.

Surprisingly manages never to grow boring -- which proves that Rohmer still has a sense of his audience.

The result is a galvanizing mix of intellectual discourse and guillotined heads.

The Lady and the Duke is not about the revolution. It's an intimate story of a woman's perspective during a dramatic event in world history.

The line between the dispassionate and the dull can be ominously faint, and when Rohmer kicks off his film with ten or fifteen minutes of solid anecdotal chat, you fear for the stamina of the audience. [13 May 2002, p. 96]

The Lady and the Duke, which drags on for over two hours, is an experiment in shooting a period film on a shoestring that turns out to be more interesting than actually entertaining.

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.